Michael Shuman laughs like a guy who’s been caught telling the same bar joke for ten years. Asked if Mini Mansions ever picked a favorite ending to “a guy walks into a bar,” he replies: “Guy walks into a bar… ouch.” Not quite the rimshot their new album deserves, but it tracks. The record—Guy Walks Into a Bar…—is less punchline, more diary. Written “in real time” during a relationship’s rise and collapse, it’s Shuman dumping out the voicemail transcripts of his heart, then pressing them to wax.
“It made writing easy because I didn’t have to think too much. Whatever was happening that day came out,” he says. Easy if you don’t mind bleeding onto the console. “I wouldn’t name names, but otherwise I didn’t hold back. You have to keep it real.”
That realness produced oddities like “I’m In Love,” a beaming track so unlike their usual noir-pop that even the band blinked. “Sorry, this is how it is,” Shuman shrugged to his bandmates. “Luckily, it was a good song.” Less lucky was “Tears in Her Eyes,” the breakup closer his bandmates didn’t get. He forced it through anyway: “It needed to be on there or else the record would’ve felt incomplete.”
Guest turns kept it cinematic. Alison Mosshart lent menace to “Hey Lover.” Shuman swears she wasn’t playing villain, but admits she lectured him about making sure the words landed with care: “I fully entrusted her. She’s brilliant.” Queens of the Stone Age drummer Jon Theodore recorded the entire record’s drums, then signed on as a surprise fourth member. “I just said, ‘Do you wanna?’ and he said, ‘Fuck yeah.’”
The problem is that a decade in, people still call Mini Mansions a “side project.” Shuman spits the phrase like it’s gum gone flavorless: “It’s been detrimental. Hard for people to take us seriously. But three records in, we’re not stopping. It’s a real band. Hopefully people get that.”
He thinks Sparks would understand. After Mini Mansions covered “Sherlock Holmes,” the Mael brothers rang them up to be their backing band. “Dream come true. They should have been the biggest band in the world, but some people didn’t get it. That’s how it’s been for us. But they did it their way. That’s inspiring.”
If Sparks survived on cult genius and inside jokes, maybe Mini Mansions can too. After all, every band is one punchline away from an epitaph. Guy walks into a bar, records a concept album, and still has to explain he’s serious. Ouch.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
